Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Save the Party

[This Document was part of the 2010 pre-convention papers submitted, which was, incidentally buried and forgotten in the comments section of Political Affairs. It's insightful analysis was apparently not considered important enough to include in the list of pre-convention documents in the article: http://cpusa.org/convention-discussion-2010/ -Ed.]

By Dean Christ, Kevin Kyle, and Joan Phillips

We think the CPUSA convention, postponed several times,
cannot come soon enough. We believe the Party has been heading in a wrong
direction in far too many ways.

What has happened the Partys
tradition of class struggle, anti-racism,anti-monopoly, anti-imperialism,
political independence, international solidarity, and indeed Marxism-Leninism?

Instead of building the Party, the current top leaders (no
matter what they think or claim they are doing) have been dismantling the Party
piece by piece: eliminating the print versions of the Peoples Weekly World and Political Affairs, giving away the
Reference Center for Marxist Studies, keeping bookstores shut, abolishing the national
Organization Department and several clubs in New York, not to mention cutting
YCL funding instead of prioritizing it.

The June 2009 move to end the print edition of the PWW sent
shock waves through the Party. Moreover, for top leaders to sweep under the rug
the many letters of protest from individuals, clubs, and districts, constituted
factionalism and a violation of democracy, for which there should be
accountability. With some top officers of the Party now advising against the
use of the word "Leninism" as "foreign," the word liquidation
used by some comrades seems no longer an exaggeration.

How to Build the
Party

While those of us opposed to the current direction may not
wholly agree on the way forward, many would agree on the broad outlines:

* Put the class struggle at the center of our thinking and
work. Organize the people's rage at Wall Street bailouts and mass joblessness
by calling for nationalization and democratic control of the banks and basic
industry, and by putting the Anti-Monopoly Coalition back at the center of our
revolutionary strategy to win socialism.

* Put forth an anti-crisis program centered on job creation
and call attention to the special suffering of youth, immigrants, and African
Americans. Work in union rank-and-file movements, building unity, militancy and
class-struggle policies.

* Organize the unemployed into a political force to be
reckoned with by the ruling class. We need Unemployed Councils to fight
politically for jobs at living wages.

* Resume our historically second-to-none role as a leading
opponent of racism, national oppression and all forms of discrimination, and as
an advocate and exemplar of Black-white unity. The conditions facing African
Americans, Latinos and other nationally oppressed people are disproportionately
bad and getting worse. Symbolic of the top leadership’s
tone-deafness on national oppression, it was an affront to Latino workers, an
increasingly important group of the specially oppressed, to dismiss the
Spanish-language editor of the PWW.

* Build political independence ideologically and organizationally.
Support progressive Democrats when they take the side of the people, and oppose
them when they take the side of corporate and military interests. Support
progressive independents. Run Communist candidates where possible and
appropriate.

* Oppose in principle the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan as predatory, unjust wars that must end at once. Oppose U.S.
imperialism in all its manifestations.

* Build mass people’s movements
with renewed energy, including the anti-war movement, the movement for women’s equality and movements against racist and political
repression. Rebuild Party-related left organizations, including in the labor
movement.

* Revive Marxist-Leninist inner Party education to enhance
members' political development. Its neglect is evident in the party
leadership's opportunistic collapseon so many issues under the ideological
pressure of monopoly capital.

* Join unequivocally the fight against the impending
catastrophe of climate change and link this cause to the class struggle.

* Heighten solidarity with the Cubans, Palestinians, and
other peoples besieged by imperialism.

* Work with other Communist Parties, such as the Greeks and
Portuguese, who have been confronting opportunism and promoting international
Communist cooperation in recent years.

Most of us recognize that the Partys
practice in the recent period, sadly, has fallen far short of these
aspirations.

The blame belongs squarely with the Party's general political
and ideological line, and not, as some say, member lethargy. The political
line, rendering us indistinguishable from the Democrats, makes recruitment
hard, saps Party morale, and leads to chronic financial crisis.

All clear-headed Communists acknowledge that, in response to
the greatest capitalist crisis in 70 years, President Obama has opened up some
policy debates around health care, job creation, workers
rights, environmental protection and nuclear disarmament. These issues were not
-- and are not -- even on the agenda of the Republican Party.

Yet these positive openings do not cancel out the
Administration’s role in the growing death and
destruction in Afghanistan, the billions of dollars pouring into Wall Street
banks and the corporations, the re-authorization of the blockade of socialist
Cuba, or the refusal to reverse Bush’s policies
of rendition and the abridgement of civil liberties.

These openings do not justify exaggerating the possibilities
opened up by the Obama presidency or warrant fantasies about a social movement
led by Obama.

More and more, the Party line subordinates everything to
Democratic Party electoral work. It fails to grasp the centrality the sheer
gravity and scope of this world capitalist economic crisis and the hardships
the crisis is inflicting on the working class, and the corresponding need for a
militant fight-back.

The line wildly exaggerates Obama’s
progressive side and sows illusions about the Democratic Party as a vehicle for
social change.

The Iraq War rages on. The President recently signed an
all-time high $680 billion war budget, an obscenity, yet the Party voice is
muffled. The line since the last convention has weakened our ties to the
international Communist movement. Too many joint statements by the world
movement on the Middle East and other burning issues go unsigned by the CPUSA.
Our Party’s rosy "analysis" of the Obama
Administration is rejected by the rest of a world Communist movement which is
mobilizing against U.S. imperialism's current crimes.

Some top leaders push technological panaceas. Yet the
over-reliance on technology is creating a party of people sitting alone in
front of a computer screen. The Internet cannot substitute for direct mass contact
with workers through print publications.

It cannot replace struggle in the streets, shops, and
communities. Militant tactics measuring up to the desperate conditions created
by this economic crisis are not pushed by the CPUSA. In practice, the current
political line ignores the lessons of the 1930s and our Party’s finest legacies:
the CIO, and the building of all mass movements from the grass roots.

Our Party publications have lost working-class common sense.
Their pages lavish undeserved praise on the Administration, and downplay what
really matters such as: an immediate end to the U.S. aggressions in the Middle
East; a jobs program which is not a carbon copy of the AFL-CIO program, and which
puts forth advanced demands such as a cut in the workweek with no cut in pay;
equality for all nationally oppressed groups; an end to the blockade of Cuba
and freedom for the Cuban Five; and health care reform worthy of the name.

The gap between reality and the current political line has
rarely been greater. We need a change.
We want to restore a fighting Communist Party organization that leads struggle.
Let’s make the most of our pre-convention discussion.

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We need a vanguard Communist Party USA - one that rejects the Imperialist 2-party monopoly, stands on its own two feet and fights for the working class in honesty and integrity.We used to be that party, and we can be again. But first we must purge the cancer of revisionism and Browderism from our ranks, that would have us betray our fellow workers to the Imperialist ruling class for the chance to sit at the table with them. We must carve it out, and taking a cue from William Z Foster, save our party by expelling those that seek to poison it.